Remembering a kind, gentle spirit

THE afternoon was a mix of sunshine and mist, the kind of weather that makes Topangans glad to be there.

From a balcony of the storied Mountain Mermaid, once the Mermaid Tavern, one could look out across the canyon toward the new hillside greening of the still tolerable season and at the faint wisps of fog receding into the distance.

I was at a wake. They call them memorial services now, and they’re a lot more dignified and sober than the ones I used to attend, like the Oakland send-off for Nels the bartender, where a Tribune copy editor disgraced the day by trying to seduce the grieving widow.

If I attended services these days for friends or colleagues who died, I’d be going to one every other week as members of my generation, good people all, are swept away like hummingbirds in a hurricane.

So when I hear that a fellow hummingbird is gone, I take a moment in my work to acknowledge his passing and then finish what I’m writing. He’d understand. We are what we do and what I am is a writer, and probably so was he.

I made an exception Sunday and went to a memorial service for Pearl Sloan, who was someone I hardly knew. In fact, I met her only once, at a reception in her house.

For some reason she made a lasting impression on me. It wasn’t just that she had a large oak tree growing in the middle of her living room. And it wasn’t just that she’d lived in Topanga since 1947, surviving all those eras of folk singers and flower children and remaining in love with the place right up to the invasion of the rich.

It was the way she seemed to become an instant best friend, which was a way she had of embracing anyone who happened to pass by. It wasn’t the kind of reeling in that implies boorishness. You wanted to know Pearl. You wanted to be her friend.

But that’s not why I went to her memorial service. My wife, the persistent Cinelli, knew her well and insisted we go together to pay homage to that kind and lovely woman. I, of course, resisted the way I resist all things good and decent, but I could see that Cinelli was not about to fold, so I figured what the hell.

The Mermaid, whose history goes to the 1930s, was jammed. Wine was served, but no one got out of control the way they used to up in Oakland, and the food laid out on the patio and in a kind of drawing room was fit for a royal banquet. We drank and ate by a pond full of fat orange fish and then went into a large room where I met Pearl.

I know I said I had met her once before, but this was different. We are judged by what others think of us and Pearl’s innate goodness emerged through the tears and laughter evoked by memories of her offered by those who were her friends and her relatives. There was sunshine and mist inside the building too.

As I sat there among the hundred or so guests, listening to stories about Pearl and seeing photographs of her and her family flashed on a large screen, I received insights to someone I had really not known at all. In writing, I’ve been able to pretty much categorize someone in the flash of a moment, but I hadn’t really tried to do that during my one meeting with Pearl.

She emerged in the ebullience of a bright afternoon as a real, living, laughing, caring, fun-loving imp of an earth mother, a part of the mountains and the oak trees that she and Bill, her husband of almost 70 years, had shared. Grown men cried openly as they told stories about Pearl, and Bill looked as though he were about to. And always there was laughter. I didn’t take notes because I wasn’t there for that, and I hadn’t even intended to write anything about it. It just came upon me the way an emotion swells up unexpectedly and you want to do something but you don’t know what.

Photographs are about as close as we come to reversing time, because we can freeze someone in the posture of their youth and continue to emulsify them on film through the following decades of maturity and old age. We saw Pearl walking through the woods, splashing about in a lake, picnicking in a park and growing old with Bill in her embrace.

I sat there after it was over as small groups gathered to enhance the memories before everyone went home and took Pearl with them, always a part of their souls, where the gentle dead are kept. Cinelli was talking to people she knows because she’s a gregarious person, the way Pearl was, and loves to be a part of others. I sit alone, just looking and thinking.

Events are a waste of time unless one achieves something from them. I got to know Pearl. I saw her as a spirit of this mountain community that is being altered by the inroads of money but will truly never change. Mountains survive us. Trees are the calendars that mark our growth, and we won’t let anyone cut them down. Pearl will always be a part of the Topanga that was, before the BMWs and the high, enclosing fences. We can all be glad for that.

I wish I’d known her better.

Al Martinez’s column appears Mondays and Fridays. He can be reached at al.martinez@latimes.com.